'Saving Hope' Premieres on NBC 7 June

Apparently, the in-between world is full of lens flares.

"This is how it happens," says Charlie (Michael Shanks), as he surveys the emergency room in Toronto's Hope-Zion Hospital. Just minutes before, he was chief of surgery, now, following a car accident in which he sustained a head injury, he's watching from another dimension. And he's philosophical: "You leave it all behind," he goes on, "Everything you love, everything you know. You belong to the hospital now. All you can do is hope." And with that, he's named his show, Saving Hope, a Canadian-made series premieres on NBC on 7 June.

While Charlie's body remains in a coma, his other self hangs around. Like other recent (and canceled) supernatural-twist shows A Gifted Man and Awake, Saving Hope provides a series of reasons for Charlie's predicament. For one, he looks after chief resident Alex (Erica Durance), whom he's about to marry when their cab is smashed ("I am having an out-of-body experience in a tuxedo," he notes). For another, he has lessons to learn and to articulate for the rest of us. It's good for doctors to be empathetic, to be humble, and to get to know their patients. It also looks like the in-between world is full of lens flares.

Some of these lessons are absorbed by Charlie's colleagues and students, as when former romantic rival turned replacement surgeon Joel (Daniel Gillies) sorts out how to deal with an Iraq war veteran (Dwain Murphy) who resists his counsel: "I watched a bunch a guys die over there for no reason," the vet sums up when Joel guess he has PTSD, "I probably do." And too many lessons are just soapily obvious: resident Maggie (Julia Taylor Ross) must learn to treat patients with respect, even if they're youthfully silly or, in the case of one young woman, overweight ("I was having trouble examining her," she tells Alex, "because she's so fat").

As Charlie functions as a kind of ringmaster, observing some four or five lessons-as-storylines, the first episode feels crammed and contrived. In a bit of inadvertent comedy, he also observes himself, in a coma and also Alex, who maintains hospital schedule (?), with occasional visits to her fiancé's bedside, at once awkward and comely as she ponders how to communicate with him. "I'm still here," his other-dimensional self says. This may be how it happens. But you can still hope it's not so corny.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.